Though she never claims it outright, the overarching project of Barbara J. King’s latest non-fiction book is to recover the political agency of animal emotions; to take seriously the contention that not only do animals feel love and mental anguish, but that they experience those passions in ways that are as profound as our own. How Animals Grieve presents a series of case studies in which pets, wildlife, and livestock respond to the deaths of individuals from their social groupings: Ethiopian monkey mothers who carry their infants’ bodies for weeks, even as they disintegrate; dolphins, who nose stillborn calves to air with repetitive solemnity; rabbits and cats in domestic homes, starving themselves into despondency on the passing of a playmate; and crows staging enigmatic crow congresses in car parks, to establish new hierarchies after a corvid death.

Examining the behaviours of bereaved animals, King does not confine herself to detached observation. From descriptions recorded by herself and others, she speculates – sometimes forcefully – about the motivating psychology of the creatures the book documents. These animals have the capacity to be ‘depressed’, ‘traumatised’, even potentially ‘suicidal’ in King’s analysis. She postulates that ‘animals read bones on the ground like we read obituaries’; and that some species enact mortuary rituals like circling a burial site, or caressing the bleached skulls of past family members. How Animals Grieve reaches beyond empirical methodologies to establish animal sorrow as a valid consideration in our ethical regard of other species.

If there remains a taboo around inferring animal emotions from animal actions, it no longer gathers voltage from a proscription against human arrogance. Today anthropomorphism (the attribution of human qualities to non-human beings) is less a sin of science than a trope of literature. Research corroborates more commonalities between humans and primates, whales, even birds than we ever thought possible. The breadth of species sharing biophysical traits with Homo sapiens is astounding, but perhaps more surprising is the nature of the consistencies now verified. Animals, it turns out, are like us socially and possess such faculties as tool use, self-recognition, symbolic communication, concepts of teleology, and culture. Few markers of human uniqueness remain intact; those that are fall to definition or degree to be maintained. Meanwhile, our imperative to empathise with animals has intensified, mindful of the environmental pressures we orchestrate, which non-human species now confront. Humility decrees not just that we can but that we should consider the animal perspective.

King is credentialled in the historical study of human societies, qualifications which might appear incongruous with her interest in zoology. What is an anthropologist doing rummaging around in the heads of animals? Her earlier books, Being with Animals (2010) and Evolving God (2007) both pertained to human–animal relationships (the former, an exploration of human connections to companion species; the latter, a provocation that human religion derives from ape morality). How Animals Grieve is predominantly focused on the relationships between individual animals. Yet the most powerful parts of the book are its closing chapters, in which King investigates at what point in evolution our humanoid ancestors began to grieve, and whom they grieved for. Of course, humans are animals too. The dichotomy is a fabrication, and not one reproduced in all human cultures across time. Anthropomorphism is only a live concern in those societies where the split between animals and humans is held to be self-evident. King’s training in anthropology paradoxically equips her to chart when humans stopped being animals, and to posit that practices of grieving were begun long before then.

As with all the things we say we will not speak of, and therefore speak of ceaselessly, death is iterative. Much of human grief is bound up in language – last rites, lamentations, keening, elegies, requiems. Wails of misery are instantly recognisable. Neurology holds that certain kinds of brains are better equipped for language than other brains, and so it might be assumed that grief is reserved for those ‘higher order’ species that have been shown to communicate in complex ways with one another, just as suffering, in animal welfare terms, is indexed to certain physical characteristics of an animal (possessing a nervous system, for example). But King is careful to distinguish mourning rituals from the subjective experience of loss and distress. Grief is not enabled by animal brains but by animal communality. So creatures like goats, turtles, crows, and gazelle also feature in this book, along with ‘charismatic megafauna’ such as chimpanzees and elephants. King holds that animal grief is sorrow for the loss of a connection, more so than mourning for the end of the corporeal entity that was the dead animal. In this way, animal grief remains subordinate to human grief, which is amplified by the ability to imagine a future in which grief continues and the dead never return.

How Animals Grieve ultimately leaves unaddressed the most contentious, and politically important, type of animal melancholy. Can animals conceive of their own ends? Are they able to envisage a world without themselves residing in it, a world outside the temporal envelope of their own survival? We, animals that we are, are so poorly able to imagine a world without other animals that we have multiplied them in thriving images, even as their living counterparts flounder. There must be a unique kind of grief reserved to those animals whose species groups teeter on the edge of extinction, whose dynasties dwindle to a handful of individuals. In How Animals Grieve, King develops an emotional vocabulary with which we might begin to speak of animal deaths not just as ecologically significant, but as events which change the way whole communities psychologically adhere.